By THOMAS CONTENT

Milwaukee's three engineering schools will announce a first-ever collaboration Wednesday, forming a joint center for energy technology research.

It marks the first time the three schools have worked together on a major project, similar to one that University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee engineering school dean Michael Lovell led while at the University of Pittsburgh.

The engineering schools have formed the Southeastern Wisconsin Energy Technology Research Center, which aims to help the region compete for federal research dollars.

Energy research has been given a boost through the stimulus package but would receive an even bigger push from a bill pending in Congress that would require significant reductions of emissions linked to global warming. The bill would aim to steer the nation's economy away from reliance on fossil fuels toward cleaner energy technologies.

"If you look at the future, that's where a tremendous amount of federal money is going to be made available for research," Lovell said.

"These collaborations will speed the delivery of research-based solutions to some of our energy issues," said Stan Jaskolski, dean of Marquette University's engineering school.

Scale is important when companies and universities seek federal grants, he said.

"When you consider the size of our engineering schools, we'd all be considered medium-sized," Lovell said. "When you combine the three of us together we're up over 200, which puts us on the scale of some of the larger and more successful engineering schools in the country."

The center has seven research projects under way that are being funded with the support of $200,000 in federal government funds as well as nearly $500,000 from private businesses and foundations, including Rockwell Automation Charitable Corp., Wisconsin Energy Foundation, The Bradley Foundation, Eaton Corp., Kohler Co., American Transmission Co., DRS Technologies and ReGENco.

Collaboration makes sense and can pay off for the schools, said Tom Bray, dean at MSOE, noting that they are teaming up even as they compete with one another to recruit students.

The funding is starting small, but organizers say the collaboration could yield much bigger federal research grants down the road.

"These are not big enough grants to accomplish a lot, but we believe that the federal DOE will find some of them very interesting, and that there will be significantly increased funding, if we do a good job," Bray said.

The projects include two at UWM designed to boost the efficiency of wind power. One seeks to adjust the speed of wind turbines to store energy when winds are strong and release it when the wind dies down. Another seeks to reduce error in wind-speed forecasting.

A project led by MSOE would investigate new energy efficiency technologies for retrofitting buildings to reduce energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. Another project, involving both Marquette and UWM, would investigate the use of algae in coal-fired power plants to capture and recycle carbon dioxide released from power plant smokestacks.

Marquette researchers will study the use of new materials for lithium-ion batteries and the use of nanomaterials to convert waste heat into electricity.

The center's announcement comes less than a year after Lovell discussed possible collaboration by the universities on energy issues during a meeting last fall in Milwaukee.

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